Don Rigoberto didn’t know what to say. In silence he contemplated the boy, who remained where he stood, looking at him calmly, waiting for his response.
“He said that to you?” he stammered after a moment. “In other words, he sent me a message. He knows about my legal problems and wants to help me. Is that it?”
“Exactly, Papa. You see, he has a very high opinion of you.”
“Tell him I accept with pleasure.” Rigoberto finally regained control of himself. “Of course. The next time he shows up, thank him and tell him I’d be delighted to talk to him. Wherever he likes. Have him call me. Maybe he can help me out, let’s hope so. What I want most in the world, son, is to see and talk to Edilberto Torres in person.”
“Okay, Papa, I’ll tell him if I see him again. I promise. You’ll see he isn’t a spirit but flesh and blood. I’m going to do my homework. I have a lot to get through.”
When Fonchito left the study, Rigoberto tried to open the computer again but closed it almost immediately. He’d lost all interest in Assicurazioni Generali S.p.A. and in Ismael’s serpentine financial dealings. Was it possible that Edilberto Torres had said that to Fonchito? Was it possible he knew about his legal troubles? Of course not. Once again the boy had set a trap for him and he’d fallen into it like a simpleton. And if Edilberto Torres scheduled a meeting with him? “Then,” he thought, “I’ll return to religion, I’ll reconvert and live out the rest of my days in a Carthusian monastery.” He laughed and mumbled, “How infinitely boring. So many oceans of stupidity in the world.”
He stood and went to look at the nearest shelves where he kept his favorite art books and catalogues. As he examined them, he recalled the shows where he’d bought them. New York, Paris, Madrid, Milan, Mexico City. How painful to be seeing lawyers and judges, thinking about the twins, those functional illiterates, instead of losing himself morning, noon, and night in these volumes, prints, and designs, listening to good music, fantasizing, traveling in time, experiencing extraordinary adventures, getting emotional, growing sad, enjoying, crying, becoming exalted and excited. He thought: “Thanks to Delacroix I was present at the death of Sardanapalus surrounded by naked women, and thanks to the young Grosz I beheaded them in Berlin while at the same time, with an enormous phallus, I sodomized them. Thanks to Botticelli I was a Renaissance Madonna, and thanks to Goya a lascivious monster who devoured his children, beginning with their calves. Thanks to Aubrey Beardsley, a faggot with a rose up my ass, and to Piet Mondrian, an isosceles triangle.”
He was beginning to enjoy himself and, almost unconsciously, his hands had already found what he’d been looking for since he’d begun his examination of the shelves: the catalogue of the 2004 retrospective that the Royal Academy dedicated to Tamara de Lempicka that had run from May to August, which he had visited in person the last time he was in England. There, in the crotch of his trousers, he felt the outline of an encouraging tickle in the intimacy of his testicles, while at the same time he felt himself becoming emotional and filling with nostalgia and gratitude. Now, along with the tickle he felt a light burning at the tip of his cock. With the book in his hands he went to sit in his reading armchair and lit the lamp whose light would allow him to enjoy the reproductions in full detail. The magnifying glass was within reach. Was it true that, according to her final wishes, the ashes of the Polish-Russian artist Tamara de Lempicka were dropped from a helicopter by her daughter Kizette into the crater of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl? What an Olympian, cataclysmic, magnificent way for the woman to say goodbye to this world, a woman who, as her paintings testified, knew not only how to paint but how to enjoy herself, an artist whose fingers imparted an exalted and at the same time icy lasciviousness to these supple, slithering, rounded, opulent nudes who paraded before his eyes: Rhythm, La Belle Rafaela, Myrto, The Model, The Slave. His five favorites. Who said that art deco and eroticism were incompatible? In the 1920s and 1930s, this Polish-Russian woman with the tweezed eyebrows, burning, voracious eyes, sensual mouth, and crude hands populated her canvases with an intense lechery, icy only in appearance, because in the imagination and sensibility of an attentive spectator the sculptural immobility of the canvas disappeared and the figures became animated, intertwined, they assailed, caressed, united with, loved, and enjoyed one another with complete shamelessness. A beautiful, marvelous, exciting spectacle: those women portrayed or invented by Tamara de Lempicka in Paris, Milan, New York, Hollywood, and in her final seclusion in Cuernavaca. Inflated, fleshy, exuberant, elegant, they proudly displayed the triangular navels for which Tamara must have felt a particular predilection, as great as the one inspired by the abundant, succulent thighs of immodest aristocrats whom she stripped only to clothe them in lechery and carnal insolence. “She gave dignity and good press to lesbianism and the garçon style, made them acceptable and worldly, exhibiting them in Parisian and New York salons,” he thought. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that, inflamed by her, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s mad cock tried to violate her in his house, the Vittoriale, on Lake Garda, where he took her under the pretext of having her paint his portrait, though in fact he was crazed with the desire to possess her. Did she escape through a window?” He slowly turned the pages of the book, barely stopping at the mannered aristocratic men, with blue tubercular circles under their eyes, pausing at the splendid, languid female figures with shifting eyes, hair as flat as helmets, scarlet nails, upright breasts, majestic hips, who almost always seemed to be writhing like cats in heat. He spent a long time lost in his illusion, feeling sure he’d be filled once again with the desire that had been extinguished so many days and weeks ago, ever since his pedestrian problems with the hyenas had begun. He was ecstatic over these beautiful damsels decked out in low-cut, transparent dresses, gleaming jewels, all of them possessed by a profound desire that struggled to become manifest in their enormous eyes. “To go from art deco to abstraction, what madness, Tamara,” he thought. Though even the abstract paintings of Tamara de Lempicka exuded a mysterious sensuality. Moved and happy, he noticed in his lower belly a small tumult, the dawning of an erection.
And at that moment, returning to ordinary reality, he noticed that Doña Lucrecia had come into the study without his having heard her open the door. What was wrong? She stood next to him, her eyes wet and dilated and her lips half open, trembling. She struggled to speak but her tongue didn’t obey, instead of words, an incomprehensible stammering emerged.
“More bad news, Lucrecia?” he asked in terror, thinking about Edilberto Torres, about Fonchito. “Bad news again?”
“Armida called crying like a madwoman,” Doña Lucrecia sobbed. “Right after he said goodbye to you, Ismael collapsed in the garden. They took him to the American Clinic. And he just passed, Rigoberto! Yes, yes, he just died!”
XV
“What’s wrong, Felícito?” the holy woman repeated, bending toward him and fanning him with the old straw fan riddled with holes that she held in her hand. “Don’t you feel well?”
The trucker saw the concern in Adelaida’s large eyes, and in the fog that filled his head it occurred to him that since she could prophesy, she must know what was wrong. But he didn’t have the strength to answer her; he was dizzy and certain that at any moment he’d faint. He didn’t care. Sinking into a deep sleep, forgetting everything, not thinking: how wonderful. He thought vaguely of asking the Captive Lord of Ayabaca for help; Gertrudis was especially devoted to him. But he didn’t know how.